One day you might be able to control things in the world with your brain…literally.

On Monday, DARPA announced that it has selected five groups to receive grants for its Neural Engineering System Design Program (NESD), a program that has the goal ofcreating “an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world.”

Recipients include the UC Berkeley as well as Brown University, Columbia University, The Seeing and Hearing Foundation, the John B. Pierce Laboratory, and Paradromics Inc. All received multimillion dollar grants to work on the project.

“The NESD program looks ahead to a future in which advanced neural devices offer improved fidelity, resolution, and precision sensory interface for therapeutic applications,” said Phillip Alvelda, the founding NESD Program Manager. “By increasing the capacity of advanced neural interfaces to engage more than one million neurons in parallel, NESD aims to enable rich two-way communication with the brain at a scale that will help deepen our understanding of that organ’s underlying biology, complexity, and function.”

The ultimate goal of the program is to create something that would be able to turn the signals from our brain into readable data, as well as to create an interface that would work in the reverse, allowing us to send data to the brain.

The first phase of the program will involve building out the actual hardware and software required. After that’s done, the second phase will be conducting basic studies with the technology followed by FDA approval. Each group is responsible for a different aspect of the project. Berkeley’s contribution to the project, for example, will be to build a “light field” microscope that can determine the firing patterns of neurons in our brain in response to stimuli.

The ultimate goal of the technology is to be able to do things like return a sense of touch to someone with a prosthetic limb, or to help restore vision to the blind.

“DARPA has been a pioneer in brain-machine interface technology since the 1970s, but we began investing heavily in the early 2000s when the confluence of improved sensing and information technology opened the door to new capabilities,” says Justin Sanchez, Director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office. “Since then, DARPA has invested hundreds of millions of dollars transitioning ‘neuroscience’ into ‘neurotechnology’ with a series of cumulatively more advanced research programs that expand the frontiers of what is possible in this enormously difficult domain. We’ve laid the groundwork for a future in which advanced brain interface technologies will transform how people live and work, and the Agency will continue to operate at the forward edge of this space to understand how national security might be affected as new players and even more powerful technologies emerge.”